That’s how it’s done.

Chuck Klosterman’s review of the newly released Beatles boxed set is a thing of beauty. Imagine trying to review the Beatles’ collected works. Nearly everyone knows the material. Nearly everything that can be said has already been said. There are no superlatives left. So Klosterman employs an ingenious gimmick.

From the first paragraph:

Like most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one.

And it goes on from there. Klosterman, with this deft move, allows himself to make the key point — that the Beatles are the most important pop band ever — by pretending to discover the joys of listening to their body of work for the first time. I kept waiting to get bored and annoyed. But I didn’t. The stunt never became trite.

For example:

It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as “Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed.

It helps that he uses humor to make larger points:

The clandestine power derived from the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul McCartney (the hummus eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat). Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968 addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.

And again:

After Mr. McCartney was buried near Beaconsfield Road in Liverpool, Beatles bass-playing duties were secretly assigned to William Campbell, a McCartney sound-alike and an NBA-caliber smokehound. This lineup change resulted in the companion albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, both of which are okay. Despite its commercial failure, Rubber Soul allegedly caused half-deaf Brian Wilson to make Pet Sounds. (I assume this is also why EMI released a mono version of the catalogue—it allows consumers to experience this album the same way Wilson did.) If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals, you will probably sleep with these records on the first date. Rubber Soul gets an A- because I don’t speak French. Revolver gets an A+, mostly because of “She Said She Said” and “For No One,” but partially because I hate filing my taxes.

Not to mention, he’s unafraid to wield a knife when he finds himself in close quarters. Of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he writes:

It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?

And you have to love a guy who finishes by telling everyone to get off his lawn:

I’ve noticed that this EMI box also includes the gratuitously titled singles collection Past Masters, but I’m not even going to play it. How could a song called “Rain” not be boring? I feel like I’ve already heard enough. These are nice little albums, but I can’t imagine anyone actually shelling out $260 to buy these discs. There’s just too much great free music on the Internet, you know? You might find the instructional, third-person perspective of “Sie Leibt Dich” charming and snappy (particularly if you’re trying to learn German the hard way), but first check out “myspace.org,” a popular website with a forward-thinking musical flavor. That, my rockers, is the future. That, and videogames.

I think this is one of the smartest reviews I’ve ever read. I’m trying to think of others that I’ve particularly liked. Well, Alan Taylor on Sean Wilentz was pretty good. Share your favorite reviews in the comments, if you don’t mind.

This is officially an award-winning blog

HNN, Best group blog: "Witty and insightful, the Edge of the American West puts the group in group blog, with frequent contributions from an irreverent band.... Always entertaining, often enlightening, the blog features snazzy visuals—graphs, photos, videos—and zippy writing...."

I can report first-person experience of Ben’s hostility to numerous cute cat videos and pictures, and his unconscionable rudeness in comparing my cat–unflatteringly!–to PK’s upstart brat of a kitten. To her face, no less. The cat’s, I mean.

I have to admit that I don’t generally remember reviews, themselves; if I find one good, that’s generally because it either convinced me of the quality of, or changed my thinking about, the thing reviewed, which then occults the review itself. So I admit that I cannot, just now, think of a review that I deem especially well done. Mea maxima culpa.

I tend to like the music reviewing at Dusted Magazine, but as I said, I can’t think, right now, of anything especially great.

Also, almost all of the reviews in Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands are delightful, but the treatment of R. Attenborough’s Gandhi is especially insightful and the lessons drawn just as applicable to popular treatments of the American civil rights movement. (You can read part of it on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Homelands-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0140140360)

I don’t like it, because he isn’t really telling us anything interesting about the Beatles. He can’t actually ignore the fact that he knows a lot about the Beatles, so just pretending to doesn’t do anything but provide a gimmick — and he doesn’t really work through the gimmick, given he clearly knows about the Beatles, and makes jokey reference to things he shouldn’t know.

If he really had reviewed the Beatles back catalogue like he didn’t know who the hell they were, that would have been — well, I shouldn’t say interesting, because it is a bit dumb, but — honest.

But really, you either review the Beatles in full knowledge that it is the Beatles you are dealing with, or you don’t. The only workable out would be to review the remastering, which is probably what people are actually interested in anyway.

The benefit of an exercise like this would be to get us to see things with fresh eyes. To do that Klosterman himself should at least have an idea what that would be like. But the best he can do is present what we all already know anyway in a fake-fresh way. The only reason he asks why anyone would compare the Beatles and the Stones is that he knows everyone does that. It doesn’t get you to think anything interesting about either band that you wouldn’t anyway have thought, and it doesn’t get you to marvel at the bigness of the Beatles. It’s there to get a smirk; in me it got an eye-rolling.

Old wine in “antiqued” bottles.

(I’d also like to know where the humor is in the passage quoted after “it helps that he uses humor …”. The device actually employed is predictable and trite.)

But the point, Keir (no reason to talk to ben; he’s a lost cause), is that everybody, not just Klosterman, knows the work, that everybody has an opinion about it, and that there’s nothing left to do but be clever. And this iteration of clever isn’t just clever, it’s also a path to making a few points about The Beatles.

Which is to say, Klosterman made neat work of a messy assignment. And he made me laugh, so points for that as well. Also, kittens are cute.

If you had to describe the Beatles sound as if they didn’t exist, what would you say it was like? Well, I’d say Merseybeat, because duh, that’s what it was. And then I’d talk about American rock and roll, about black music, etc, British Invasion, that sort of thing. Which would be interesting; it situates the Beatles in a place and time, and moves away from the shallow decontextualised view of the Beatles. Except Klosterman talks about Oasis.

Now, the Beatles sound a lot more like early Kinks than Oasis; so why would you say Oasis? Because you already know Oasis are Beatlesque. Which makes a mockery of the whole thing; you aren’t talking about the Beatles, you’re repeating the myth-of-the-Beatles, and not very well.

You may as well just come clean and say `they made pop but then they grew up and made rock and then they went a bit hippie which was a pity but they were the Greatest Ever, unless you think that’s the Stones.’ It would be more honest.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of the Twain, Jason. Thanks for the reminder. As for you, Keir, we’ll have to agree to disagree. And hcr, I’m about to google up that Lane review. As I’ve said here before, I quite liked his treatment of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

All right, someone’s got to complain about the Unfoggedization of certain EOTAW comment threads. And that foot is me. The simple truth is that Klosterman really can be very good, as he is here. Ari is right, Ben and Keir are wrong, Keir on the Oasis joke is extra extra wrong, and — though I hardly need to say it — kittens are ugly and should be exterminated.

Can’t find an easy link to it at the moment (seeing as I’m very lazy), but Anthony Lane’s review of “Showgirls” has long been a favorite of mine, namely for his speculation about whether the movie’s title was a noun or an imperative.

These good suggestions aside, I think you actually can’t write a sustained review of the Beatles as if you know nothing about them. You can’t. This conceit, to my mind, is actually more invested in how this kind of ballyhooed release is supposed to make us think we haven’t heard them before, or supposedly asking us t hear them in a new way. It’s a concept that deserves some poking and smirking at. The supposition is that the Beatles are the greatest band of all time -that underpins the product. Klosterman isn’t so brash or annoying as to actually care about taking apart that supposition, he just asks us to notice how overdone the supposition actually is.

I thought the review was basically dumb and silly, but not in a Ministry of Silly Walks way, in a dumb way.

To my mind (ear?) the really interesting thing about the Beatles is that they have actually become folk music. Children learn them — children *love* them. The Beatles wrote the songs you find yourself singing to your crying baby as you walk the floor at night, they’re the songs you sing with the family on car trips, they’re the songs middle-school students will know. Folk songs: sung by the folk, known by the folk, part of the general folk culture.

I actually have lots of favorite reviews & went looking hoping one of them, a review of a review (presented at a kind of revue) was transcribed online somewhere. found it:
(tho I should note that I usually like Christgau alot myself.)

…Hi Bruce
Springsteen is allright by the way
He gets my seal of approval, I think he’s groovy
You notice the way the critics turned on him,
like after they were on him, right?
When he needed them, they weren’t there at any time
Critics: what is Robert Christgau do in bed?
You know, is he a toe fucker?
Man, anal retentive, “a consumer’s guide to rock?!?”, what a moron
a consumer’s guide to rock, man, I object to the fucking liner notes
He’s starts studying rock ‘n roll, I can’t believe …..Barocque rock. man
A study by me a Robert Christgau, And John Rockwell, man, wauw
You know how heavy it is to get reviewed by Rockwell
and he says you’re intelligent, fuck you
I don’t need you to tell me that I am good
Mister Reed,
you know, you say ooh man I’m just some kind of a maniac
Like in the New York Times said Mister Reed, fuck you
Your doorman wouldn’t kiss my ass now I don’t give a jack
He, right, he studies at Harvard though, monologue
But dig this: Opera. He’s a fucking opera guy!
And that is the critic for the New York Times,
that makes and breaks the best rock bands,
that are very heavy and intelligent
Notice that there are no coloured rock groups?
certainly not in the New York Times with John Rockwell,
he wouldn’t go there, man, he comes to CBGB’s with an armed guard,
don’t touch me man, and he’s a big dude, someone should say:
John, don’t be afraid, Christgau is like an anal retentive
Nice little box and a B plus
CanYou image working for a fucking year,
and you get a B plus from an asshole in the village voice?…

I remember really liking some of the retrospect reviews in Reviews in American History. Also, Haskell on Novick. But that’s probably not quite what you mean.

I know very little about the Beatles. I’m not reading the review though; like most people who don’t know much about them but do know something about them and have heard some of their music, I’m not really interested in knowing more. That, I suspect, makes it hard to write a review where not knowing much about them is more than just a conceit.

“One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He’s good, nobody can touch Him.”
— John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983

there’s nothing left to do but be clever. And this iteration of clever isn’t just clever, it’s also a path to making a few points about The Beatles.

Oh? What points?

Obviously we disagree about the cleverness both of the concept and the execution; fine. (Except it isn’t because you’re amazingly, jaw-droppingly wrong.) Says who there’s nothing left to do but be clever? (Bonus question: how is there being nothing left to do but be clever compatible with making a few points about the Beatles? I take it he’s not just rehearsing already known or widely recognized points; it would be somewhat inept to call that “making a few points” or to single it out for praise. But if he’s capable of making these points, isn’t that something other than being clever?) And here’s a thought: if there’s really nothing more to say, why not … not say anything? (We’ll pass over in silence the tacit admission your claim that there’s nothing left to do but be clever embodies: namely, that it doesn’t say anything and isn’t actually a review.)

I may lose all credibility for saying this, but I actually thought that Pitchfork’s reviews of the reissues, or at least those that I read, were decent. Here’s Revolver. Not clever, and it probably doesn’t tell you much you didn’t already know, but it’s a decent review nonetheless, and much less grating than Klosterman’s “review”.

Keir is right again about Oasis: Klosterman doesn’t do a thing to take apart the supposition that the Beatles are the greatest and underlie everything, etc., true; nor does he make us aware of how overdone that supposition is. You can see this from the bands he mentions: Badfinger and Oasis (I admit I don’t know the other one)? But it’s true that those bands are Beatlesesque; it’s not at all overdone to point at them and say, “sounds like the Beatles!”. He might have had a chance at showing us how overdone the supposition is if he said that the beatles sound like a combination of Anthrax, Gram Parsons, and Modest Mouse—except that would be absurd.

Since Bérubé already called me wrong (and what’s wrong with a little Unfogged, pal?), let me say that I just saw The Third Man and thoroughly enjoyed the zither music.

This conceit, to my mind, is actually more invested in how this kind of ballyhooed release is supposed to make us think we haven’t heard them before, or supposedly asking us t[o] hear them in a new way.

As I understand it, many of us haven’t heard them this way before; some albums are available for the first time on cd in stereo, and some in mono. (Confusing!) You might think that’s not actually worth caring about, and maybe it isn’t; it would be nice, then, for a review to indicate whether it’s worth it for the non-diehard to drop the cash for it by discussing the mixes and sound quality. Oh look, someone presumably more interested in reviewing what was before him than revealing himself to be familiar with a host of references and jokes did just that (how unexpected, given where it appeared!).

But this way of taking Klosterman’s piece, as demonstrating something about how the release is supposed to make us think … (but what? you say it’s invested in this strategy surrounding the release, but in what way? presumably in showing it to be bosh, or something)—well, it strikes me, after reading the piece, as something only someone who already believes that it’s quality could believe. There seems to be no positive reason to believe that that’s what’s going on.

No, ben, I don’t think Klosterman’s points are necessarily very original. But I do think he scores them nevertheless: The Beatles as central place in the geography of pop music; the ways in which the theatricality and personality of the band members becomes part of that music; and most of all — and this may even be original, for all I know — the relationship between memory and teleology when considering cultural touchstones as well-worn as The Beatles’ recordings.

The first two points (might as well stick with that word, “points”, now that we’re here, right?) are pretty banal, though the structure of Klosterman’s conceit makes them feel fresh enough. Again, though, it’s that third one — the idea that because of the nature of cultural transmission, reconsidering the impact of the body of The Beatles’ work is a pretty tricky business — that might have some legs.

It strikes me that the review asks a reader to consider the way that s/he initially learned about The Beatles, how s/he followed the band’s trajectory, and where s/he places these recordings in the history of pop music. Because nearly everyone, except andrew it seems, knows The Beatles relatively well, and because most of Klosterman’s readers have been listening to the band for a long time, these are interesting questions to ask. The queries force us to think about how we’ve categorized recordings that, for most of us at least, are central to our understanding of pop music.

So here’s one for you: do you think that a point has to be original to be a point?

Sorry, I updated what I wrote before I saw your comment. It’s really not fair that I get to do that, I know. But that’s life in the big city. Anyway, I don’t know if the additions I made recast my arguments. But I stand by them. I do think the conceit matters, in other words. As for why he talks about rock bands rather than pop stars, I don’t know. Then again, isn’t Mick Jagger both a pop star and a member of a rock band?

though the structure of Klosterman’s conceit makes them feel fresh enough

They feel fresh to you, they feel fresh to you. I really hate it when I read assessments of a work that include rhetoric like that—we feel, we’re reminded, etc. Maybe you are, and maybe you think I should be, but you’ve gotta make a case for the latter claim. Anyway, they don’t feel fresh to me, by dint of his conceit.

So here’s one for you: do you think that a point has to be original to be a point?

Well, no. One can make the same points over and over again. But if you’re going to praise someone’s unusual conceit because it supposedly allows him to make some points, then I expect that the points he can make are conditioned somehow by the conceit he’s employed. Which, if they are actually familiar points, they are not. Which makes me wonder why saying that the conceit allowed them to be made is the best description (it didn’t forbid them to be made, but it certainly didn’t uniquely allow them to be made), and why, then, the conceit is such a big deal.

I guess this relates to your feeling of freshness: He didn’t make new points (says ari), but he did make the old points new, and the conceit let him do that. I’m not sure I can say anything more than that I’m not feeling it. But perhaps that’s because I’m extremely tired. I’m sure I’ll be able to destroy you after my swimbeauty rest.

It strikes me that the review asks a reader to consider the way that s/he initially learned about The Beatles, how s/he followed the band’s trajectory, and where s/he places these recordings in the history of pop music. Because nearly everyone, except eb it seems, knows The Beatles relatively well, and because most of Klosterman’s readers have been listening to the band for a long time, these are interesting questions to ask. The queries force us to think about how we’ve categorized recordings that, for most of us at least, are central to our understanding of pop music.

As I said I’m going to bed, but you realize that the above is something other than just being clever, right?

They feel fresh to you, they feel fresh to you. I really hate it when I read assessments of a work that include rhetoric like that—we feel, we’re reminded, etc.

Fair enough, ben. But given that this is a blog (not, say, an unsigned editorial*), and that I’m posting on it, I think my rhetoric wasn’t so universal as all that. It seems likely to me that most people would make the connection that I think the points were fresh enough, not that I think everyone will agree with me.

* And even then, really. Most readers know that the editorial speaks for the views of the editorialist, or the editorial board, or the owner of the publication. Right?

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve turned out to just be the wrong sort of person, but I enjoyed and learned a lot from Pitchfork’s review of the reissues. It happens that I don’t know a lot about the Beatles – I was a few years young to be enjoying them much at the time, and interested in other stuff in my formative years. (I was thirteen when I heard “Jocko Homo” for the first time, and that set the trend for my teen listening.) So I’ve been learning about and enjoying the Beatles’ stuff more over time, in little fits and starts. Tom Ewing’s pieces tell me things that help me know more and enjoy more. I can pass on many of the alternatives.

Seconded, I too know little about the Beatles beyond the songs themselves, and at least some of the in-jokes in Klostermann’s review go over my head (for instance, I know that the Beatles and Stones are often compared, but I don’t precisely know why; I had to look up the dead McCartney reference and still don’t entirely get it; I don’t really know much about the Yoko Ono thing beyond the claim that she “broke up the Beatles”). The Pitchfork reviews, however are indeed informative and I am learning a lot.

Perhaps someone should do a very dry academic profusely annotated reader’s guide to Klostermann’s review for the likes of myself.

Since Bérubé already called me wrong (and what’s wrong with a little Unfogged, pal?), let me say that I just saw The Third Man and thoroughly enjoyed the zither music.

Well, I suppose I saw that coming. Turn off that awful zither already and listen to some Badfinger, and then go back and read contemporary commentary on, say, “Day After Day” that insisted the song was actually recorded by the Beatles. You’ll thank me someday.

Klosterman’s point, as I read it (which, like the Islamic socialism in Obama’s school address, provides the subtext to the actual text), is that there’s no plausible way to review these reissues as “new” releases. Stereo, mono, yes, that’s mildly interesting for you crazed audiophiles. But those of us who have been Beatleologists for the past 30 years or so have already lived through:

(a) the “Rarities” collection and its derivatives;

(b) the massive Anthology opus, which made the “Rarities” collection and its derivatives look like thin gruel;

(c) the reissued (2003) Let it Be … Naked, which involved a belated but total overhaul of the record, de-Spectorizing it (and effectively de-Lennonizing it too, restoring it to Paul’s original idea for the thing);

Compared to all that, this boxed set is just … another Beatles collection. Hence (I think) Klosterman’s decision to pretend-review it.

As for the ESPN piece, Andrew, you don’t think it’s remarkable that in a discussion of sports and steroids, Klosterman adduces the day Bob Dylan got the Beatles stoned? I dunno, I’d never seen that move before.

And Keir, the Beatles stopped being simply Merseybeat by the time A Hard Day’s Night was out.* “Thank You Girl,” “Hold Me Tight” — that’s Merseybeat. Gerry and the Pacemakers could have recorded ’em. “If I Fell,” the title track, “I’ll Be Back” — that’s something else altogether, something … Beatlesque, whereupon Tin Pan Alley starts trying to write Beatlesque songs (N. Diamond, “I’m A Believer,” Boyce and Hart, “Last Train to Clarksville,” etc.) about 20 years before the Gallagher brothers got around to it. So the tiredness of the “sounds like the Beatles!” bit is also part of Mr. Klosterman’s bit. Indeed, it is central to his point.
___

*Not to mention the fact that it was absolutely unheard of, in 1964, for a band to release a 13-song album on which there were no cover tunes. Unheard of.

“[Cooper] bends a “sapling” to form an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are “laying” for a[n] . . . ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake . . . . Did the Indians notice . . . that they could . . . just [step] . . . aboard . . .? No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indian’s never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians . . . .
Now, then, what did the six Indians do? [One by one they] let go and drop….. And missed … [and] lay there unconscious.”

Okay, you’re reading a book in which characters board a boat called the Ark and ride it out to an artificial island called “Muskrat Castle.” I guess you need to know a _little_ about Delaware indians to know that Muskrat is their name for Earth Diver, but the whole Ark>Noah thing should be a bit of a clue that you’re dealing with a Creation allegory. Look up and you’ll find braves diving and people faling from the arch of the sky and lying about unconscious. It’s not exactly subtle, any more than the rest of the book.
Twain is right. Cooper is not subtle. Twain, on the other hand, is. Has anyone read _Deerslayer_ seriously since? I’d say not. The most popular novelist of the nineteenth century, and the only American novelist of his era who is actually read, is writing his heart out with his dying breath to sum up the point of his entire life’s work. And we laugh, and we laugh….

I enjoyed David Foster Wallace’s review of whatever the novel John Updike had just written in “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” which can be found here; “Great Male Narcissists” is, or should be, an abbreviated term of art (GMN).

Berube has already made my point, but he buried my lead. It’s not a review. It’s a farce. When Keir writes that Klosterman “makes a mockery of the whole thing” or ben complains that he’s not doing what a review should, they are missing the point: It is a mockery. It’s not a review.

Now I don’t love it as much as ari does, and while I enjoy Klosterman’s writing, the structure of his essays always feels a bit clunky and haphazard to me. Still this was, for me, if it needs saying, amusing and entertaining, mostly because more of his jokes than not turn out to be subtle rather than obvious.

Case in point, ben you note that you’re not familiar with Cornershop (which is just sad, kids these days, etc.). Cornershop is a British-Indian indie-rock and dance band. Their 1997 album When I was Born for the Seventh Time (which was my favorite album that year and most which holds up surprisingly well) contained a cover of “Norwegian Wood” sung in Punjabi, which functioned as both an appreciation and a reclamation. Yes this is just Klosterman being clever and if you don’t get the reference you don’t get the joke, but such is the way of things.

Klosterman’s point, as I read it (which, like the Islamic socialism in Obama’s school address, provides the subtext to the actual text), is that there’s no plausible way to review these reissues as “new” releases. Stereo, mono, yes, that’s mildly interesting for you crazed audiophiles.

Well, I dunno. Multiple people in this thread have claimed to have gotten something out of the pitchfork reviews, which, admittedly, were not reviews of the albums as “new” releases (but who ever reviews reissues as new releases?), but were at any rate honest-to-god reviews.

Maybe Klosterman’s article was just the thing for those among us who were untrustworthy twenty years ago.

I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Taibbi on Friedman.

It is striking, isn’t it, that with the exception of the occasion of this whole discussion, everything that’s been posited as a great and/or memorable review has been an evisceration of the subject.

As for the ESPN piece, Andrew, you don’t think it’s remarkable that in a discussion of sports and steroids, Klosterman adduces the day Bob Dylan got the Beatles stoned? I dunno, I’d never seen that move before.

I haven’t seen it before – at least I don’t think so, but I’ve seen a lot of discussions of drugs and sports go off into the non-sports world, so I might have seen something like that – and it could have been a lot more interesting if he made a more extended comparison of sports and performing arts. But he doesn’t, the way he inserts it into the discussion is kind of jarring given how much of a straightforward article – lacking in a conceit like the Beatles review – it is. I do think it’s a good piece more of less, just not great or remarkable for the quality of the writing. It doesn’t add much beyond the Beatles analogy to discussions of sports doping that have been going on for a long time in some of the Olympic sports, but at this point most things written about those sports don’t add much either.

Is it possible that Klosterman’s piece isn’t the only way to review these pieces as much as it’s the only way to write a review of them that’s not boring for people who already know the music? I mean for me, it’s ok funny. It makes an overall point about the mythology/errata of the Beatles ecliosing the music, but it doesn’t really carry that point into individual sub points that would let anyone hear the whole thing anew. But in the process of not doing that it does get off some funny one-liner and remind some of us of the more interesting pints of the popcrit-meta discussion of the Beatles.

One thing that seems curious to me is that most of the people who have commented that they didn’t get the jokes also say that they aren’t interested in finding out what the jokes are referring to. What’s with that? I ask this as someone who’s whole course of study probably goes back to trying to figure out what the hell critics and letter writers were talking aobut in Creem magazine in the very late 70s/early 80s. is it some intersection of the music’s generational omnipresence combined with Klsoterman’s manner, which might be constructed as saying “you ought to get these jokes?” I can see where that would be grating I guess, but being curious about the parameters of that meta-conversation doesn’t mean accepting either the importance of the material or the positions of the conversants. There’s a whole way of talking about pop music/musicians that grew out of various people grappling with the work in these records. some of that grappling is superfluous & pretentious but it seems at least worth being curious aobut.

I saw a version of this conceit on Usenet years ago. Someone wrote a review of the Lord of the Rings as if it had just came out. The reviewer mocked it for being derivative of Sword of Shannara. It also pointed out that if Gandalf and elves are so gul-durned magical, then why do they do so little magic?

It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.

I know this is way upthread, but, when Robert Christgau reviewed the Lou Reed album “Take No Prisoners,” that contained the diatribe against reviewers, he thanked Lou for pronouncing his (Christgau’s) name correctly, and gave the album a C+. So, outside of the back pages of the New York Review of Books, this is a rare case of a reviewer reviewing a review of his reviews.

URK: Is it possible that Klosterman’s piece isn’t the only way to review these pieces as much as it’s the only way to write a review of them that’s not boring for people who already know the music? Maybe so. But it seems to me that it’d be better to say exactly that and go on to something else.

“Gene Simmons, singing bassist, Bat-Lizard and gross-out king of Kiss, is probably the brains behind the group. But his album begs the question: how much brains does it really take to be the brains behind Kiss? Less than Einstein, more than sweet potatoes would be my ballpark answer.”

And Keir, the Beatles stopped being simply Merseybeat by the time A Hard Day’s Night was out.*

But that’s the sort of thing you’d talk about; you wouldn’t mention Oasis or whatever, because really, Oasis don’t sound that much like the Beatles compared to the people that the Beatles were listening to and playing with; they merely sound more like the Beatles than Blur do.

(And if Merseybeat is only correct for a while, the Oasis-like Beatles moment isn’t that long either.)

I think, to sum up, I have two problems: one Klosterman isn’t funny, which may be subjective but is also true, and two he doesn’t make any new points. If he were funny, the second would be forgiveable, and if he were original the first wouldn’t matter, but taken together?

I also think it isn’t funny mainly because he is too predictable — after all, Oasis, Stones, Yoko Ono jokes? A blind man in the dark could have seen them coming.

The metapoint about the difficulty of reviewing the Beatles isn’t that new: see Shakespeare, see the Italian Renaissance, Picasso, etc. There’s a valid discussion about much you can really review that sort of body of work, but I don’t think Klosterman is very interesting about it.

For the record, humor is not subjective. I LOL’d three times while reading that review, and I checked my response against the International Seismic LOL Evaluator in Stockholm, and three was precisely right, with a margin of error of less than .15 LOLs.

However, I agree that Oasis doesn’t sound very much like the Beatles. But then, I never got the whole Oasis thing.

Please listen to “Wonderwall” and tell me that Liam Gallagher doesn’t sound like a man doing a John Lennon imitation. (And don’t hate me for making you listen to Wonderwall — I could have said “Champagne Supernova” — winner of a coveted “Bernie” award from the Village Voice for worst lyrics — and given you genuine cause for hatred.)

As someone who grew up on the Beatles, music and mythos, I found the Klosterman piece pretty good. But I can identify with the negative reactions: as I read it, chuckling along, I thought to myself, “Is this really working?” It’s a very obvious conceit, and a good chunk of the humor is little more than childish opposite jokes (“The Porsche 911, with an engine so anemic that it doesn’t even require a radiator…”). But there I was, chuckling.

I suspect part of the reason that it works is that it’s a sort of loving mix of obvious and subtle jokes – some of the material is obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of rock history, while other bits (esp. the dead Paul stuff) requires either having been there or having studied it at some point. It creates rather a nice rhythm of pleasant familiarity (calling the Sgt. Pepper getups “technicolor dreamcoats,” hardly original) and flow-interrupting throwaway lines (wait, is “Norwegian Wood” actually, in any sense, about lesbians?).

As for its merits as a piece of criticism? Obviously CK decided to take the opportunity to review the most familiar works of modern music and use it to write a funny essay, not to either review the music in any traditional sense or to advance the state of human knowledge. I don’t really have a problem with that, and I’m not sure why it seems to bother Ben and others quite so much. This is the internet age; there’s no crowding out. I was able to read both the straightforward NYT review and the amusing CK review. If CK had been as earnest as the NYT one, I would only have gained one more viewpoint (most likely either similar to the first or self-consciously contrarian). Instead, I got something amusing to read. Huzzah for the internet.

Last: I’m kind of surprised that no one here has engaged with what is arguably CK’s only serious claim: that the Stones followed in the Beatles’ footsteps while they were active (an uncontroversial claim), and then ceased evolving (a quite controversial claim). People probably aren’t taking it seriously because it’s a joke review, but CK is actually rather on the nose about it, and I suspect he kind of means it. Certainly you could make the argument that the Stones tried more different sounds while the Beatles were around than they did subsequently (no doubt they experimented with disco sounds, and the albums vary in quality, but I’m not sure that the Stones evolved much after ~1970). I’m not sure it’s a winning argument, but it’s an interesting, and unusual*, one.

I don’t really have a problem with that, and I’m not sure why it seems to bother Ben and others quite so much.

It doesn’t bother me so much that CK decided not to write a review but rather to write a funny essay. What bothers me is that (a) he failed to write a funny essay but (b) he’s getting a lot of praise for having written a funny, and even insightful, essay, which also (or so some of the praisers maintain) is a good review.

But no one cares about the sacks stat or any other one in football. OK, players care, and people who try to use stats to analyze the game, but it’s a completely different dynamic from baseball, where even casual fans can tell you the significance of 56, .406, 714, 755, and 61. Probably the only number in football that gets thrown around much is 1000 yards rushing in a season, but even that number is pretty meaningless (it was a threshold of greatness in the 14 game season era; now it basically signifies an effective, not a brilliant, runner).

On a related note, Carlin certainly talked about the “masculine warfare” angle of football, but I don’t think he said a thing about stats in baseball – he was all about “caps” and “parks.”

I don’t understand how Michael, who was doing so well for a foot, could have got this so vastly wrong. And Sir Charles, I’m not sure you’ve helped as much as you might: the one that sounds most Beatlesy to me is “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

“Don’t Look Back in Anger” is the Oasis song that sounds most Beatlesque to me, but then it’s also the only Oasis song I know. JPool describes the video as “awful”; I’m not sure I would call it that, exactly, but it’s definitely extremely weird and confusing. Especially the glasses (talk about trying too hard to imitate John Lennon).

Because it’s genius, concise, positive, and touches on much above, Christgau’s review of Prince’s Dirty Mind:
“…conceptualizes–about sex, mostly. Thus he becomes the first commercially viable artist in a decade to claim the visionary high ground of Lennon and Dylan and Hendrix (and Jim Morrison), whose rebel turf has been ceded to such marginal heroes-by-fiat as Patti Smith and John Rotten-Lydon. Brashly lubricious where the typical love man plays the lead in ‘He’s So Shy,” he specializes here in full-fledged fuckbook fantasies–the kid sleeps with his sister and digs it, sleeps with his girlfriend’s boyfriend and doesn’t, stops a wedding by gamahuching the bride on her way to church. Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”

You mean “What bothers me is that (a) he failed to write an essay I found funny.”

This is a different statement from the one you’ve made. It’s legitimate, whereas what you wrote isn’t a claim you’re entitled to make.

“but (b) he’s getting a lot of praise for having written a funny, and even insightful, essay, which also (or so some of the praisers maintain) is a good review.”

As it happens, people vary in what they gain insight from, and what they find funny. You are apt to have this experience of people having different opinions and reactions from you in the future, I predict.

“but (b) he’s getting a lot of praise for having written a funny, and even insightful, essay, which also (or so some of the praisers maintain) is a good review.”

It’s almost as if people were allowed to have subjective opinions about aesthetic matters, rather than agreeing with your objective stance.

“All of that supposed ‘evidence’ can be explained away with the aid of supplementary hypotheses, for instance that you all have defective senses of humor.”

It’s a possibility. Alternatively, perhaps we’re all in on the conspiracy against you.

Or perhaps one person is writing all the comments but yours, and is merely most excellent at sock-puppetry.

the Stones followed in the Beatles’ footsteps while they were active (an uncontroversial claim), and then ceased evolving (a quite controversial claim). … Certainly you could make the argument that the Stones tried more different sounds while the Beatles were around than they did subsequently (no doubt they experimented with disco sounds, and the albums vary in quality, but I’m not sure that the Stones evolved much after ~1970). I’m not sure it’s a winning argument, but it’s an interesting, and unusual*, one.

You’re first “uncontroversial claim” is nothing such. Sure, there’s Satanic Majesties’, but other than that, and “I Wanna Be Your Man,” where were the Stones copying the Beatles? Both were copying black American music styles and covering r&b* hits, with the Beatles mining rather popular recordings and the Stones borrowing from groups less likely to reach white ears. (Both overlapped at Chuck Berry.) The Stones’ mimicking of African-Americans continued to evolve (or find new fonts of inspiration, whatever), sampling reggae, Philly soul, Ohio-Players-style funk, and disco. (They also began to cover Motown standards in the 70s, so I guess they imitated the Beatles then.)

For the record, I think the Stones have almost nothing on the Beatles during the “yeah years,” but Beggar’s Banquet is their rock** apotheosis. Their stylistic pastiches in the 70s show good taste, but you mind as well listen to the originals…

*Using the broadest definition of the term.
**Using the narrow definition of the term.

On the video for “Don’t Look Back In Anger”: it makes me want to punch all of them all the time. I don’t think that was the response they going for.

I can’t pin it down. Does anyone know whether this video came out before or after Blur’s “Country House”, which ironically featured far less country house than “Don’t Look Back In Anger”? I don’t like that video either, but that’s just because I never enjoyed Benny Hill. It doesn’t make me want to punch anyone.

JRoth, those are good reasons why I wrote “partly contradicted” and “basically a rehash” rather than less qualified statements. They don’t make me change my mind about the essay being good, but ultimately not really remarkable, to very good or great.

I think the Rolling Stones reached their heights at the point where they seemed to have stopped noticing that the Beatles existed — and very close to when that actually happened — I would submit that the run through Beggar’s Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street is as good a creative period as any band in history.

I agree with Sir charles as well, tho even on Exile – an album I dearly love-it seems like they’re doing the stones in places in the same way that they do Santana on the middle bit form Can’t You Hear Me Knockin.” And it seems like this is what they keep on doing from about that point onward, turning, except for brief bursts, into the greatest Stones cover band in the world.

And, appropo of noting else here except that this is a rock thread: RIP Jim Carroll.

May I call your attention to Leon Wieseltier’s review of Norman Podhoretz’s “Why are Jews Liberals?” in today’s NYT? I hooted and howled with every paragraph, and I’m still laughing. Just one of several bits that stand out: “In the absence of arguments, Podhoretz offers memories. ‘Why Are Jews Liberals?’ is yet another one of his autobiographies; his life is a gift that keeps on giving.”

Fats: If the Stones had never done “Her Satanic Majesties,” the charge wouldn’t stick for a second. But they did, and that leaves the following progression, generally stated: ’63-’64, British Invasion-style stuff (“yeah yeahs,” as you put it); ’65-’66, more ambitious/sophisticated stuff, including “Paint It Black” and “Mosther’s Little Helper;” ’67, psychedelia; ’68->, hard rock. Familiar pattern, no?

I don’t actually think the Stones were literally aping the Beatles, but there’s no question that they evolved in parallel (in contrast, neither the Kinks nor the Who could be fit into the progression I outlined).

andrew – I had read you as being more down on the piece. I certainly understand not thinking it’s brilliant.

#7. There is a species of philosophy, which cuts off all hopes of success in such an attempt, and represents the impossibility of ever attaining any standard of taste. The difference, it is said, is very wide between judgment and sentiment. All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard. Among a thousand different opinions which different men may entertain of the same subject, there is one, and but one, that is just and true; and the only difficulty is to fix and ascertain it. On the contrary, a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: Because no sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind; and if that conformity did not really exist, the sentiment could never possibly have being. Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes. It is very natural, and even quite necessary to extend this axiom to mental, as well as bodily taste; and thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the skeptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision.

#8 But though this axiom, by passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction of common sense; there is certainly a species of common sense which opposes it, at least serves to modify and restrain it. Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. Though there may be found persons, who give the preference to the former authors; no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous. The principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot, and while we admit it on some occasions, where the objects seem near an equality, it appears an extravagant paradox, or rather a palpable absurdity, where objects so disproportioned are compared together.

See, I leave the thread for a day and the Unfoggedization comes back. All right, I suppose that could be a good thing.

I’ve always marveled at the people who say that Oasis sounds like the Beatles, because I’ve listened to both, and I’m positive that Oasis songs contain way too much suck to be “Beatlesque.”

This, in fact, is the very nub of my gist. Yes, Eric, I understand that Oasis tried to sound like the Beatles and dress like the Beatles and name a song after Harrison’s first solo album and so forth. But I think they suck, faster than a cannonball. Whereas Badfinger is responsible for three or four very nice pop tunes.

As have “wo’n’t” and “sha’n’t”—in each of which the first apostrophe takes the palce of more than one letter. Perhaps the “n’t” is taken as always abbreviating “not”, with no exception for “nnot” made in the case of “can’t”.

eric, why do you hate my childhood? I hav’n’t seen the The Dark Crystal in a while, but I remember liking Aughra. How about I give you whatever Frank Oz did in Labyrinth? That movie was a solid member of the sucking class.

We could deductively conclude that both Fozzy Bear and Yoda rule if we were to posit that “everything in which Frank Oz appears confers ruling (ruledom? ruleitude?) on all its parts.” Alas, Frank Oz also appears in Blues Brothers 2000, so that category is not coherent.

Maybe the category eric suggests, however–the “every character for which Frank Oz supplies a voice rules”–is more tenable. I mean, the man did voice Animal. And Teddy Roosevelt.

I think he’s referring to the freewheeling back-and-forth that combines an irreverence based on mutual respect and an ever-present intellectual seriousness.

I think Michael is objecting to comments on this thread being both arbitrary and fun, but not on Friday. (Although that’s when the thread started.)

Irreverent freewheeling back-and-forth (combining mutual respect and an ever-present intellectual seriousness) is part of it, of course, as are arbitrariness and funitude. But it’s the rapid-fire one- and two-line responses that simulate actual conversation at, like, a really lively salon that really Unfog a comment thread. That’s when ponderous commenters like me, who show up only once every few hours, have to write whole paragraphs to Fog things up again.